Apple Tool Could Transform How Doctors Gather Your Data

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Apple's new iPhone platform could enable doctors to dramatically
increase the amount of health data they can gather on patients,
the company says.

The company revealed the platform, called ResearchKit, today at a
talk at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, California.
ResearchKit allows doctors to develop their own apps to gather
data on people's health conditions, from asthma to Parkinson's
disease. The new system also makes it easy for medical
researchers to enroll patients in clinical trials, a typically
expensive and slow process.

So far, doctors have developed apps on this platform to study
Parkinson's disease, blood sugar variability, asthma
triggers, breast cancer recovery and cardiovascular health. But
because the development platform is open source, meaning that
anyone who wants to develop an app can do so, many more clinical
trial apps could soon follow, said Dr. Michael McConnell, a
cardiovascular medicine professor at Stanford University School
of Medicine.

The system also gives patients the ability to see their own data,
which usually isn't possible with traditional medical trials,
Apple said in its presentation.

Limited data

Almost all of the medical knowledge that researchers have comes
from clinical trials, in which doctors systematically study the
effects of medicine, activities and lifestyle factors on human
health. But running such trials is an expensive, slow and
difficult process, McConnell said.

"You have to recruit a large number of people, and to have a
broad, representative population in a clinical trial is
challenging," McConnell told Live Science.

Another problem is that doctors often use a limited amount of
data to analyze risk factors or diagnose disease. For instance,
in cardiovascular health, researchers rely on people's
self-reports of how much they exercise, a notoriously inaccurate
measure, McConnell said.

And doctors may do just one test — evaluating a person's gait on
a scale of 0 to 4 — when diagnosing Parkinson's disease, said
Apple Senior Vice President of Operations Jeff Williams.

Tons of data

By contrast, new
phone apps can gather and analyze a wealth of data, and
provide it to users in real time. For instance, a Parkinson's app
called mPower allows patients with Parkinson's to track things
like vocal tremors, hand tremors and gait problems using a
phone's built-in microphone, accelerometers and gyroscopes.

Another app, called GlucoSuccess, tracks data such as food
intake, medication and physical activity to see how all those
factors affect
blood sugar levels in those with diabetes. And MyHeart Counts
will track how people's activity levels throughout the day
correlate to their
heart disease risk factors, such as blood pressure and
cholesterol levels. The app will also test different coaching
interventions to see whether certain methods are better at
getting people up, moving and living healthier lifestyles,
McConnell said.

Circle of trust

All of the data is anonymized and sent to a secure server; Apple
never sees the information, the company says. In addition, users
can opt to allow their data to be used in just one clinical
trial, or to also allow future researchers to have access to the
data, raising the possibility that trials looking at other
medical questions down the line could use the same data,
McConnell said.

Right now, the system relies on users to manually input much of
their data, such as their cholesterol levels, rather than
gathering it directly from testing labs or medical records.

"At this stage, we are trusting a broad range of users to input
their data, so it will be more and more real-world data, but it
will be noisier data," McConnell told Live Science.

However, ResearchKit is integrated with Apple's
HealthKit platform, which allows programmers to make apps
that share data with Apple's Health app and with other apps
systematically. And the fact that ResearchKit open source means
that as technology improves, future iterations of apps could
integrate measurements such as blood tests and blood pressure,
McConnell said.